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Modernity and Morality in Habermas's Discourse Ethics

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Modernity and Morality in Habermas's Discourse Ethics Modernity and morality in Habermas©s discourse ethics Article (Accepted Version) Finlayson, James Gordon (2000) Modernity and morality in Habermas's discourse ethics. Inquiry, 43 (3). pp. 319-340. ISSN 0020-174X This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/1737/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse: Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University. Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Modernity and Morality in Habermas’s Discourse Ethics † I. Introduction One of the features that marks out Habermas’s Discourse Ethics from most other contemporary moral theories is the extent to which it is informed by social scientific research in cognate areas of sociology, anthropology, and psychology. This has meant that from its inception Habermas’s conception of morality has been hand and glove with a conception of modernity and with a theory of modernization. The moral theory forms part of a wider social theory. I take it that this is a strength, not just a peculiarity of Discourse Ethics. For much of moral philosophy after Kant, despite Hegelian protestations, has been guilty of neglecting the historical, social and cultural dimension of the phenomenon of moral normativity it explicates. As the programme of Discourse Ethics has developed since the early 1980s so the constellation of moral theory and modernization theory has altered. Originally Discourse Ethics is conceived as a programme of philosophical justification of the moral principle or the moral standpoint (MCCA, pp. 43, 78-86, 96).1 The formal derivation of principle (U) from non-moral premises is central to this programme. If the formal derivation goes through, then (U) can be justified on the non-moral grounds of Habermas’s theory of communicative action and the pragmatic theory of meaning.2 Thus, according to the original programme of Discourse Ethics a normative moral theory falls out of a pragmatic theory of the meaning of utterances. One of my aims in this paper is to show how and why the promised formal derivation of (U) from non-moral premises fails. 2 As far as Discourse Ethics is concerned this is an important and unresolved issue in its own right. But I also want to elaborate the wider significance of this failure. The point I have in mind is this: as originally conceived, the central principle of Discourse Ethics, principle (U), is justified independently of Habermas’s theory of modernity.3 The theory of modernization, as I outline in II below, provides historical and genealogical arguments which show how morality developed from the substantive value-laden tradition into a procedural conception of rightness as impartial justification. It narrates the historical and cultural genesis of a conception of moral rightness, but does not justify that conception. At most, modernization theory, if true, lends indirect corroborative support to Discourse Ethics that is both weak and, importantly, surplus to requirements.4 Communication theory and the pragmatic theory of meaning alone justify the moral principle and explicate the meaning of moral rightness. According to the original programme then, modernization theory, if true, provides weak indirect evidence that the conception of morality offered by Discourse Ethics is correct. However, the conception of morality offered by Discourse Ethics, in so far as it is independently justified, lends strong justificatory support to modernization theory. The former, narrower theory illustrates the central thesis of the latter, more general theory. The conception of morality offered by the original programme of Discourse Ethics bears out the generalization contained in what I call The Modernity Thesis. This thesis, one that reverberates throughout Habermas’s social theory, is that: Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch: it has to create its normativity out of itself. (PDM, p.7) 2 3 The original programme of Discourse Ethics offers a picture of morality in which the sources of moral normativity are contained in the formal pragmatic preconditions of speech oriented to reaching consensus, and are not drawn from a substantive conception of the good life internal to a particular tradition or form of ethical life. This outline shows that Habermas’s proposed formal derivation of (U) from non-moral premises does two things: it shapes the original programme of Discourse Ethics and it provides a justificatory support for modernization theory. The trouble is that neither Habermas nor any of his followers have so far managed to provide the formally valid derivation of (U) promised by the original programme. Habermas is aware of this lacuna and has recently proposed a weaker justification of principle (U), by abduction, in lieu of its formal-logical deduction (DEA, p.60).5 In III below I show why the proposed formal derivation of (U) cannot be provided. In IV I argue that the weaker abduction of (U) rests much more firmly on considerations of modernization theory than Habermas is prepared to admit. Finally, in V, I sketch the upshot of this alteration for the original programme of Discourse Ethics, namely that Habermas must abandon the forlorn task of convincing the moral sceptic and sticks the more feasible one of explicating and confirming the self-understanding of moral agents. In turn this alters the relation of the theory of morality to the theory of modernity: The Discourse Theory of Morality is no longer justified independently of modernization theory. Consequently the theory of morality no longer offers justificatory support to modernization theory: it is at least partly justified by modernization theory. 3 4 II. Modernization Theory and Programme of Discourse Ethics (1) I shall begin by outlining Habermas’s theory of modernization and its relation to his moral theory. Habermas develops his concept of modernity through a critical engagement with the concept of rationalization in Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Lukacs, Horkheimer and Adorno. He narrates a general and plausible story concerning the emergence of secular morality as the historical consequence of a monotheistic Judaeo-Christian tradition whose values and norms presuppose the existence of an objectively good and just way of life. That way of life is recommended by a God who is both the omnipotent creator of an ordered cosmos and the absolutely just and good omniscient saviour of human kind. In this tradition each human being has a dual role, as a member of religious community of neighbours, and as an individual whose salvation depends on God’s judgment. This duality is reflected in two aspects of morality: (i) universal respect for others (and accountability to all others) and (ii) the absoluteness or unconditionality of moral requirements. According to Habermas two world-historical shifts inaugurate the transition to a modern conception of morality. First, the shattering of this religious tradition and the pluralization of conceptions of value under conditions of multiculturalism result in the separation of the notion of justice from a particular concrete conception of the good - the ethos of the Christian community. Second, the demise of the metaphysical conception of essence and the gradual transferal of epistemic authority to the natural sciences fundamentally alter the meaning of morality. The core conception of morality preserves itself under modern conditions by harnessing the idealized procedure of discourse as a formal standard of impartial justification that any valid substantial norm must 4 5 meet. Thus moral discourse replaces the example of a ‘missing “transcendent good”’ (DEA, p.58). The story Habermas relates does not describe the singular fate of the Western Occidental tradition, but a more general process of the detachment of forms of normative authority from religious world-views.6 Habermas pays particular attention to two further tendencies that I have so far omitted to mention: the rise of individual autonomy or what Hegel calls ‘subjective freedom’,7and the differentiation of spheres of rationality, the increasing ‘autonomy’ of aesthetic, ethical-legal and scientific rationality.8 The ‘modernity’ that results from this process presents an ambiguous legacy for modern individuals. On the positive side, their sphere of freedom is greatly increased. The power of the state, once uncoupled from religion and tradition, is held in check by publicly accessible criteria of legitimation: e.g. whether or not its affairs are run in the interests of
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